Gainward's AGP8X NVIDIA Powered "Golden Samples"

Gainward's AGP8X NVIDIA Powered &quot;Golden Samples&quot; - Page 1

When it
comes to maintaining longevity in the video card market,
nVidia seems to have the process down to a science. Since
the release of the GeForce4 series of GPUs last year, the product
line has enjoyed a rather successful maturation process.
This maturity in nVidia's products has given manufacturers the ability to
be creative with their designs, offering a wide variety of graphics card combinations.
Now, it isn't uncommon to see Ti4200 cards being
offered with higher core and memory clock speeds,
giving them Ti4600-like performance levels at a fraction of the price.
With the AGP8X (AGP 3.0) standard gaining acceptance, the
Ti series is poised for yet another incremental upgrade.

Today, we
are going to take look at two new cards from
Gainward that
bring AGP 3.0 compliance to the GeForce 4. The main
advantage to the improved AGP bus is the doubling of its
bandwidth to 2.1 GB/s when compared to AGP 2.0. While this may sound like a
significant increase, that would have a seemingly major
effect on performance, we have some reservations. The truth is that
today's hardware and
software rarely tap the full potential of the AGP
2.0 standard, leaving us with little expectations with the
new standard, at least for now. Gainward, on the other hand, was not
looking for a simple AGP8X upgrade, instead they added new
features to each card to help them stand out in their
respective crowds.

Let?s
take a look and see what Gainward has to offer to us this
time around.

Specifications and Features of the Gainward GF4
Powerpack! Pro 600 8X TV/DVI

The nView hardware
and software technology combination delivers maximum
flexibility for multi-display options, and provides
great end-user control of their desktop. nView
allows end-users to select any combination of
multiple displays, including digital flat panels,
analog CRTs, and TVs, and to modify the display
properties using an intuitive software interface.

LMA II boosts effective memory bandwidth by up to
300%. New technologies―including Z-occlusion
culling, fast Z-clear, and auto
pre-charge―effectively multiply the memory bandwidth
to ensure fluid frame rates for the latest 3D and 2D
games and applications.

A crossbar-based
memory controller: Ensures that every aspect of
the memory system is balanced and that all memory
requests by the graphics processor are handled
properly. Under complex loads, LMA II?s memory
crossbar architecture delivers 2-4 times the
memory bandwidth of other standard architectures.

A Quad Cache
memory caching subsystem: High-speed access
buffers that store small amounts of data and
operate at tremendously high bandwidth, ensuring
that data is queued and ready to be written to the
memory. These caches are individually optimized
for the specific information they deal with,
resulting in almost instantaneous retrieval of key
data.

Lossless Z-buffer
compression: Reduces Z-buffer traffic?one of the
largest consumers of memory bandwidth in a
graphics subsystem?by a factor of four, without
any reduction in image quality or precision.

A visibility
subsystem: Determines whether or a not a pixel
will be visible in a scene. If it determines a
pixel will not be visible, the pixel is not
rendered, saving valuable frame buffer bandwidth.

Fast Z-clear
technology: Minimizes the time it takes to clear
the old data in the Z-buffer, boosting frame rates
up to 10% without compromising image quality.

Auto pre-charge:
Warns the memory device of areas of the memory
likely to be used in the very near future,
allowing the GPU to spend less time waiting for
memory and more time rendering pixels.

API SUPPORT

DirectDraw

Direct3D

DirectVideo

DirectX 8.1

Open GL ICD for
Windows 95/98/2000/XP/NT

OS
SUPPORT

Windows
95/98/ME/2000/XP/NT

Specifications and Features of the Gainward GF4
Powerpack! Ultra/650 8X/XP TV/DVI

GeForce4
Value

Key Features

Integrated nVIDIA
GeForce4 Ti4200 - the most powerful GPU.

Support 128MB
high-speed 128bit DDR RAM/SDRAM memory.

Support high quality
TV-OUT for NTSC/PAL system

TV-out connector
support S-VHS mini Din and one Composite .

Support capture
Video from TV,VCR,DV or camcorder with Composite and
S-Video.

Video-out support
(NTSC/PAL) TV system. It can providing best-of-class
TV-out functionality up to 800x600 resolutions.

Support LCD output
with DVI connect, the resolution up to 1600x1200

Gainward's XP-Feature for Video-In and Video-Out

Gainward's
award-winning XP feature, also known as "VIVO",
provides two video-in connectors and two video-out
connectors (both composite video and s-video for PAL
and NTSC) for smooth video recording and video
editing including accelerated DVD playback with
enhanced motion compensation in hardware.

EXPERTool
TM Performance Tuning Utility

EXPERTool TM is
Gainward's performance tuning utility that allows
the user to easily adjust the engine clock and
memory clock of any Gainward product from nVIDIA's
recommended default settings to even higher
settings. Gainward offers the end user the choice to
either run the board in "Safe Mode Setting" or at
"Enhanced Setting" ("Golden Sample" products only,
featuring a more stable design with faster memory)
which offer enhanced real-world 3D performance for
higher resolution. Performance tuning is the most
commonly used method among the ultimate power gamers
to extract the utmost performance out of a high
quality 3D graphics card.

API
SUPPORT

DirectDraw(R),Direct3D(R)

DirectX 8.1

FULL Open GLR ICD
1.3 support

OS
SUPPORT

Windows 95

Windows 98

Windows ME

Windows 2000

Windows XP

Windows NT

BUNDLE:

The bundles of the two cards were virtually identical. Each came
with a comprehensive Drivers/Setup CD, a copy of Serious Sam ? The
Second Encounter, WinProducer, WinCoder and a full version of WinDVD. A cable
was included to support the built in TV-In/Out functions
while a DVI to VGA adapter was included for
connecting a standard VGA monitor to the DVI output. This is particularly handy
if your planning on using dual VGA
monitors with either card. The Driver CD comes
loaded with two sets of
drivers, one deemed the ?Faster VGA Driver? which were 29.80s
and the others were ?WQHL VGA Driver?, also version 29.80. 3D
stereo drivers were also included for use with 3D
accelerator glasses (not included). Video Capture Drivers
are also provided to enable the TV-Capture capability of
either card. The Driver CD came
with a decent set of utilities for maximizing your
experience with the 'Golden Sample', however, one of these really stood out
above the rest.

Generally we are not a big fans of the free
utilities manufacturers often supply with their
hardware. Usually we feel that these "freebies" tend to be focused
more on looks than proper functionality and are
more often a marketing tactic than anything else. With Gainward,
however, this couldn't be further from the truth.
What they have done is put together an excellent little
application called EXPERTool for tweaking, adjusting and
overclocking your Gainward video card. EXPERTool is
a small
taskbar utility that offers easy access to all of the key
settings available for the video card. Whether you
want to change screen resolutions, adjust the color of the
desktop, or overclock the card, EXPERTool
gives you simple one-stop access.

We were particularly fond of the Performance section which
provided overclocking with a single click. By
starting off with the Safe Mode settings, the card was
configured to run at
its default clock speeds. Once we clicked on the
?Enhanced Mode Settings," the card was overclocked to the highest setting
that Gainward has deemed safe for that model card, but you
can obviously go even higher. With the ?Enable
Maximum Clocked Settings? selected we were able to
manually push the card even higher than Gainward's
recommendations, squeezing the card for all that it was
worth. Certainly the EXPERTool may not be quite
as robust as such programs as Powerstrip, but it was much
more useful than the popular Coolbits registry hack and
it was the same price (which would be free).

Now let's turn the page and
take a quick look at each of the 'Golden Samples'.